B.2.1. Introduction

The reader of this chapter surely knows how important it could be, in some circumstances, to resist the interference induced by distracting events, sounds, thoughts, and so on. This attentional ability, however, is very fragile and could easily suffer a check. Possible sources of distraction are legion, and can be of all kinds. In laboratory, several tasks are used to test this kind of ability, from Stroop to Go-No Go test, passing by the anti-saccade task. In this latter task, participants are asked to make a saccade in the direction opposite to a salient cue appearing in one side of the visual field. Performances are often contrasted with pro-saccades, in which the goal was to make a saccade toward the cue. Many authors considered that the rather automatic pro-saccade had to be "inhibited" in order to achieve the correct anti-saccade response (e.g. Mitchell, Macrae, & Gilchrist, 2002). In the domain of visual attention, one of the most efficient sources of distraction is probably the abrupt onset of an irrelevant stimulus (Yantis & Jonides, 1984, 1990). However, it seems possible to resist the attentional capture (AC) it could induce, and some authors claimed that this could be done via cognitive inhibition (e.g. Lamy, Leber, & Egeth, 2004; Michael, Garcia, Fernandez, Sellal, & Boucart, 2006). Resisting interference, however, could be impaired in several conditions. For instance, lesions to the pre-frontal cortex frequently induced a characteristic "syndrome", whose one major feature was a dramatic sensibility to interference, clinically very patent (Godefroy, 2003). The right ventral pre-motor cortex appeared particularly implicated in this sensibility (Aron, Robbins, & Poldrack, 2004; Michael et al., 2006).